Prerequisites

Before using the scheduler, ensure that the following tasks are completed first:

• The schedule is created with the appropriate start and end date

  • The start date determines the weekday that each round/week begins

• Teams have been added to the schedules with the correct order

  • Odd numbers of teams may affect the schedule

  • Round robin depends on the team order; if teams ever change, maintain a consistent order

After completing Step 1, You will now be directed to the Scheduler tab.

Generate a Schedule

To generate a draft of your schedule, click on +Create in the top right-hand corner. Then click on Generate Schedule.

Matchups

The scheduler is split into two halves; how to produce the matchups and when to schedule them. This first halve determines how many games are produced and how teams will face each other.

Method

The method essentially determines how many games will be produced.

Games per Team

This will produce enough matchups to satisfy a minimum number of games for each team. Odd numbers of teams with an odd number of games per team is not supported.

Total Rounds

This produces matchups up until the specified number of rounds.

Type

Type specifies how matchups are determined.

Single Rotation

This is based on a round robin schedule where each team plays once per round.

With an odd number of teams, this will result in a bye for each team once per round. The Limit Round Byes option enables a slight deviation from round robin to reduce the number of byes per round as an optimization for fairness.

Double Rotation

Similar to double rotation, this is also a round robin algorithm, except each team plays one home and one away game each round.

Both Single and Double Rotation produce consistent results given the same input. i.e., for the same 12 teams with the same order, and the same number of games, single and double rotation will always produce the same matchups consistently.

Matrix

This option is available when the Games per Team method is selected. This is also known as matrix scheduling.

The scheduler will produce a number of matchups between each team pair and in the second step a matrix will be provided allowing you to tweak matchups as you wish.

Note that unlike the Single and Double Rotation schedulers, this method does not always produce consistent results for the same inputs, so it is possible to run it multiple times to produce varying results in some cases.

When using the matrix table, totals are show for the number of games each team has, and the total will be highlighted if the total does not match your configuration.

An option to add cross teams is also available beside the top right menu to generate cross schedule/group games. To know more about cross scheduling, read the Cross Scheduling Documentation.

It is not possible to schedule an odd number of teams with an odd number of games per team with this matrix option. Even and odd combinations are possible, just not odd teams and odd games.

Scheduling

This step is actually entirely optional. If you wish to schedule your dates and times manually, you unselect the Round Type option and proceed.

This step is not available if you’ve used the Matrix matchups type, as it does not have a concept of rounds which makes it incompatible.

Weekdays

This will schedule all games of each round on the same date, and leave the time and surface to be manually selected.

If you want to use multiple weekdays, the order of the selected weekdays is significant and will affect the resulting schedule. Selecting Friday and Saturday is different from selecting Saturday and Friday.

Next, unless you have a single weekday, the Distribution Mode decides an important decision that most people may not realize is necessary: is it Friday and Saturday of the same consecutive week, or is it rotating Friday the first week then Saturday the next week?

Rotating means that each round is a week, while Consecutive means that there may be multiple rounds in a week. Naming this was difficult without being confusing; there isn’t really a clear term for this.

Home Slots

This assumes that each team has their team settings configured with a time slot, which specifies the weekday, time and surface. Matchups will be scheduled by using home team’s settings each round.

If multiple home slots are configured in the team settings, only the first will be used. In the future we may use this to limit conflicts.

Dates

The start date defaults to the schedule’s start date, so why is this here?

Leagues may produce schedules in multiple stages so that they can run a set of rounds then decide to rebalancing teams between groups before running another set of rounds, for example.

Breaks may also be specified, which are based on a start date which must be the same weekday as the start date, and a total number of weeks. It’s not possible to limit the number of days to more or less than a week.

Breaks

Breaks can also be defined in your schedule, based on a start date which must be the same weekday as the start date, and a total number of weeks. It is not possible to limit the number of days to more or less than one week.

Preview

The final step is the preview, or what you see is what you’ll get.

At this point the games don’t exist yet, so you can still go back and easily tweak the parameters to get what you want if it doesn’t look right the first time.

Once you complete this step, draft games will be created and you’ll need to delete them to start over.